Wing Fortress Zone
by Frozen Nitrogen
Summary: Sonic 2 adaptation. Sonic & Tails pursue Robotnik to his aerial stronghold, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, the good Doctor is disinclined to extend his hospitality. Fiery battle ensues!
1. Chapter 1: Wing Fortress Zone

**Timestamp: MY10.360 - 56.9.34  
****Location: Wing Fortress, 74/C Deck  
****Pathway: File overflow 9375v37n4m -- redirect 9375v38n4m  
****PARSING**

_"…To call them 'emeralds' is a misnomer if ever there was one. It was only in my initial analysis, with a few cursory notes on the inferred modal specular reflectivity, that I designated them as such. That the name remains is somewhat uncomfortable to my sensibilities as a scientist, but, it has to be said, the confusion thus engendered amongst my foes, savages though they may be, has been profoundly useful to me._

_To call them 'chaos', on the other hand, cuts directly to the heart of the matter, for they are, despite my considerable efforts, still profoundly, almost maliciously, capricious in nature. That is not to say that their behavior can never be understood, nor controlled; indeed, I have devoted my present research efforts almost exclusively in striving towards this goal, and analysis asofar has... not so much revealed concrete facts, but at least suggested a theoretical avenue down which one can proceed._

_So, I shall use the term 'Chaos Emeralds', dubious though it may be. One thing we can say about them, at least, is that these things are not made of normal matter, nor probably even matter at all. One needs take only a cursory glance at even their most mundane 'physical' properties to see that this is the case; apparently arbitrary spectral shifts, kineluminescence of unpredictable magnitude, phase-space pseudorotational cycling through Platonic and non-Platonic geometries, etc. And this isn't even mentioning how, left to their own devices, they tend somehow migrate to through subspace to pocket dimensions (or 'Special Zones, as they have come to be known). This most... curious property leads me to conclude that they, along with a host of other non-classical phenomena on Mobius, are perhaps all singular facets of the same problem; the Emeralds, the gold rings, the Special Zones: all artifacts of higher-dimensional pseudo-geometric flaws in the phase-space of reality. When I first conjectured this, I was at a loss how to go about even generating a theoretical framework to describe their properties, but my recent work on Non-Euclidian topology in hemi-integer dimensional spaces has indicated a... a..."_

**RECORDING ENDS  
****Timestamp: MY10.360 - 56.11.50**

Robotnik's scientific dictation faltered as his attention was drawn to a blinking blue light on the console behind him. Swinging his spheroid form from one computer bank to another, the gargantuan scientist fumbled his way through pie tins, printouts, and half-drawn weapon designs, searching for the buried keyboard.

"Code Blue! CODE BLUE!? Where?" he yelled at the screen, franticly cycling through the reams of data before him. "Where is that hyperkinetic erinaceine?"

A string of digits informed Robotnik that the answer to his question was: 40.317 West, 60.156 South. And Robotnik was a mad scientist; he knew his geography.

"Ha! Ha ha! Hahaha!" The Doctor's body wobbled grotesquely as he threw back his head in mad laughter. His robot sentries had detected the anarchic menace on the oil rigs offshore of Mystic Caves. Ambushing the hedgehog at the edge of the Oil Ocean would leave him with absolutely nowhere to run.

Robotnik drummed his fingers manically on the desk, his moustache twitching as he ran through Wing Fortress' armory manifest in his head. What to use, what to use?

**WING FORTRESS QUARTERMASTER INVENTORY  
****Transaction I.D.: WF c9001/71.a  
****Timestamp: MY10.360 - 56.23.19  
****Checked out: 1 (One) "Hammerhead Submersible, combat class; incl. fore antideuteron cannon, grappler claw; modified for use in high viscosity environments"  
****Authorization: Dr. Ivo Robotnik**

* * *

**Timestamp: MY10.363 - 40.2.91  
****Location: Wing Fortress, 04/A Deck  
****Pathway: Cache lost 0078t57h4i – emergency redirect 1123b56n2o  
****PARSING**

"…_-tailed mutant kitsune pursued in a bi-plane! The aft point-defense cannons shot it down, but the hedgehog made it onto MY facility! It's broken through the on-board defenses and is progressing fore on the outside of the carrier; the structural damage that blue pincushion's inflicted on the superstructure means I daren't do a barrel roll to shake it off, like the pestilent tic it is! I've charged the control room countermeasures and dedicated the control algorithms to the navigational computer; the master node is in the cockpit, so there's no chance of the anarchist mutant disabling it before it activates. Unfortunately, the processing power I've lost already means th-"_

**-ERROR /-1123b56n2o-WF:codeML**

Static briefly hissed from the screen on Robotnik's right, which then abruptly blanked out as Wing Fortress shuddered under another explosion.

"…means that if another node gets taken out, non-critical systems will start to FAIL!" He roared, slamming a gloved fist down onto his work desk. Reams of printed machine code and half-eaten egg sandwiches scattered onto the floor.

Why was this blue freak so persistent? Robotnik had thought an aerial installation would be safe from its meddlesome depredations, but it seemed he had miscalculated. Badly. And the only thing he hated more than miscalculation was that selfsame mutant hedgehog who kept exploiting the miscalculations.

A screech of tortured metal, followed by the sound of smashing glass, sounded from several rooms aft. Robotnik snarled, hefting his grotesque bulk out of his chair. He had genuinely lost count of the number of times he'd been forced to face the hedgehog himself, but… well, his legions of robot defenders has been either utterly crushed or simply outpaced by the blue blur, so the Doctor really had no choice.

* * *

Sonic planted his hands on his hips and tapped his foot, regarding the defensive turret in front of him with a sly grin. The wind tore through his blue spines as Wing Fortress labored on through the Mobian sky, but Sonic's air of nonchalance gave no hint of the fact he was riding a doomed aerial juggernaut and staring a gun turret dead in the–

A chicken-like robot burst out of the portal, guns cycling, but Sonic was on it before it even had time to lock on. Covering the hundred metres in less than a quarter of a second, Sonic's foot connected with the metal exoskeleton. Hard. The automaton popped like an over-ripe fruit, scattering a profusion of wires and bolts that were immediately whipped away by the merciless winds. A comatose bird, covered in viscous pink electrolyte, slid out of the wreckage, tumbling end-over-end across the carrier's beige paintwork. If it was lucky, it would regain consciousness before it hit the ground. Or a propeller. But Sonic didn't want to think about that too much.

Launching himself off the ruined robot's emplacement, Sonic ricocheted off an aerofoil and blasted full force into a hatch cover. Sparks blossomed as his spines scythed through the plating, and with a screech of tortured metal, the bulkhead exploded inwards.

Sonic flew in with it, landing amidst a storm of steel and glass shards whipped up by the decompression. The hedgehog grimaced as they lacerated his face and chest, and tore patches of fabric out of his gloves; but then it was over as quickly as it began, with the last lose fragments whipped out into the atmosphere.

Gritting his teeth, Sonic pulled on a shard of glass that had embedded itself in his cheek. It came out, leaving a sanguine gash behind, and, with a sense that wasn't quite sight, but wasn't quite anything else either, he caught a flicker of a gold spinning away from him at the extreme edge of his vision.

Sonic wasn't the kind of hedgehog to wonder too closely about the nature of these gold rings. Kintobor had tried to explain what he thought they were, once, but Sonic had only caught snatches of "reciprocal t-space" and "toriodal M-branes". He'd been eating pizza at the time, and double mozzarella was far more interesting. What he did know was that the rings were profoundly useful, and that it was extremely foolish to be anywhere near a badnik without at least one.

Snatching at the arcing peculiarity, he felt, more than heard, the distinctive 'ting!' as the golden distortion reabsorbed into the atoms of his arm. Weird forces flashed across his body, and his various grazes faded. Incomprehensible geometries danced in Sonic's mind for an instant, then: his injuries were gone, as if they'd never even existed.

Shaking the glass out of his spines, the revivified hedgehog braced himself against the shattered bulkhead door, and launched himself into a sprint through the interior of Wing Fortress.

* * *

Robotnik didn't have to wait long. No sooner had he finished reprogramming the room's defense systems, the far door exploded off its hinges, absolutely no match for Sonic's momentum. "Hi Doc," he remarked with a grin, "Your robots missed me. You really should put at least some targeting hardware in there, y'know!?" Smirking in a manner he knew would infuriate the scientist, Sonic advanced forwards.

Just as planned, Robotnik's face turned purple with rage behind his walrus-like moustache. He was an engineering genius; a genius! Anyone who didn't agree should… well, they should:  
"DIE, you contemptible FILTH!" he bellowed. As Sonic launched himself across the room, Robotnik's ham-sized palm came down on his console.

Sonic, curled into a cobalt buzz-saw, stopped dead in mid-air, before crashing to the floor with a thump. Robotnik sneered at his nemesis through the force-field, bringing his face so close that static crackled across his moustache. "Not quite fast enough, were we, vermin?" he observed, as Sonic tested the barrier with his fingers.

"Oh, real clever, Eggman. You caught me." The hedgehog retorted, pushing against the force lines. "What are you going to do now, talk me to death? You know I'm gonna find a way out of here before you can get to the end of one of your rambling speeches."

"My name is Ivo Robotnik, hedgehog. That's DOCTOR Ivo Robotnik to you." he spat, prodding the console with flabby fingers. "And I stopped trying to educate you and your fellow savages some time ago. Indeed, I have a far more interesting fate in store. Voila!" The Doctor tapped the final button in his sequence, and above Sonic, machinery whirred to life. From the ceiling, two cruelly barbed, spinning disks emerged, immediately homing in on Sonic's position.

The hedgehog became a blur of motion, darting backwards and forwards inside the force cage as he danced away from the diving platforms. Cackling hystericly, Robotnik entered another sequence, and, with a hum of electromagnetism, the forcefields began to collapse. Slowly, but inexorably, they were restricting the space Sonic had to move in. The blue blur inside sped up, and Robotnik rubbed his hands together with malicious glee.

"And now, for the coup de gras, you obnoxious pest!" he announced. Tapping a final sequence, Robotnik set in motion more machinery embedded in the ceiling. Metal shields unfurled to reveal a glowing white hemisphere, flickering to blue and back with a frequency that hurt the eyes. Robotnik couldn't see it, but Sonic's expression grew significantly grimmer as watched the device charge – at the same time as he narrowly avoided losing an arm to the razored disks.

The blue/white hemisphere emitted an ominous 'whoop' as its capacitors reached full capacity. Then, with a sound of indignant atoms being rent asunder, a burning blue-white beam scythed through the room, leaving blackened char across any surface it touched. The blue blur inside the forcefields sped up even faster, dodging the platforms, the beams, and the walls of its own prison.

Robotnik's mad laughter echoed even above the sound of sizzling metal and swishing blades. He might actually do it, this time; he might actually reduce that blue hedgehog to the crimson bloodsmear it deserved to become! The platforms spun faster, and faster, as he opened the laser cannon up for another blast. The crystal diode exposed, and charged, Robotnik's hand descended towards the 'fire' key-

And the pad in front of him erupted in a shower of sparks. Roaring with surprise, Robotnik waved his gloved hand through the air to quash the flames on his fingers. Looking up through the distortion of the forcefield, the Doctor saw Sonic riding one of the spinning disks. He was singed and bleeding, but despite that, the hedgehog looked very pleased with himself as the ruined laser sparked and sputtered over his head. Whilst Robotnik watched, the forcefield began to shimmer; the laser's destruction must have fried the flux modulator, damaging the muon generator too.

Robotnik growled at being denied his quarry once again. This always happened? What was it about his machines, that there was always one weak point that accursed hedgehog could find, and exploit?

Well, that was a question for another day. Robotnik was nothing if not a fiendishly intelligent villain, and he knew very, very well that it would be unwise to still be standing in front of Sonic when the forcefield failed. Fixing the hedgehog with a final, hate-filled glare, he turned and waddled towards the cockpit as fast as his legs could carry him.

* * *

Sonic regarded the retreating mad scientist through the failing force barrier. And with no small sense of satisfaction. He did indeed feel rather pleased with himself; Robotnik had set him quite a challenge this time, compared to their last encounter in the polluted slick of the Oil Ocean. The Doctor's efforts to constrain him had almost worked; if he hadn't gone and put a large, eminently breakable laser in there as well, the crushing forcefields might have caused Sonic considerably more trouble given a few more seconds. Jumping off the failing metal platform, Sonic pushed through the attenuated shield with scant resistance. His spines glowed faintly as trapped magnetic ions collided with his wake; then he was through, and dashing into Wing Fortress' cockpit.

What confronted him was an immense bank of controls; computers, dials, altimeters, switches, control and security systems, and wires, wires, everywhere. The hum of electricity pervaded the entire room; multicolored lights flashed epileptically, and no small number of screens showed 'Red Alert', complaining to non-existent overseers about the damage Sonic himself had already wrought throughout the structure.

Planting his feet slightly apart, Sonic surveyed the machinery in front of him with a kind of savage expectation. With one gloved hand, he ran his fingers through his spikes, dislodging several crystal chips and pieces of wreckage; half out of diligence, half out of vanity. Then, lowering himself to the ground, he slowly curled up into a ball of razor spines. And kept curling. The outer edges of his spikes ran across the floor, frictionless, so he was rolling on the spot. As his momentum brought him back to where he started, he pushed against the floor with his sneakers, speeding up his rotation. And again. And again. And again and again and again and again…

Turboing on the spot, Sonic's revolutions caused a mini-cyclone in the enclosed room. Papers flew wildly, loose wires flailed like angry cobras, and even more sirens started blaring. Then, instead of just kicking up centrifugal speed, Sonic launched himself outwards, channeling his rotational energy into a blue ball of destruction aimed at the console banks. In the blink of an eye, Sonic went from a whirring sphere on the floor of the flight deck, scythed through the navigational equipment, and out via a concealed hatch in the floor. Behind him, the cockpit burst into flames as every piece of machinery left crumpled under the impact of his sonic boom. The blue hedgehog landed on a gantry attached to the nose of Robotnik's flying fortress. As a gout of fire lanced out of the room above him, Sonic glimpsed the good Doctor: he was strapped into the cockpit of what appeared to be a streamlined jet, franticly twisting the dials on a control panel.

Sonic wiped the sweat from his eyes with a singed glove, and grabbed a nearby girder to support himself. This was not good. He had no rings. Getting hit by Vulcan cannons or energy beams took its toll even with their weird golden energies coursing through his veins. Without them… well, the laser had been close. If Robotnik was going to come at him with another of his personal mecha, Sonic wasn't certain he could handle it.

But Robotnik didn't seem interested in Sonic in the slightest, right now. Indeed, through narrowed eyes, it looked as though the Doctor was planning to run, not fight.

A nerve-jarring shudder ran through the gangway Sonic stood on, and he heard the very definite, very ominous sound of the Wing Fortress' engines cutting out. The giant vessel began to sink in the sky, as its horizontal motion changed into a somewhat disturbing vertical motion. Sonic idly considered that he should probably have thought about how he was going to get off the airship alive _before_ he smashed up the bridge. "Tails, where are you when I need you?" Sonic muttered.

But Tails was… the last Sonic had seen of him, he'd been franticly hammering at the controls of his biplane as it fell out of the sky. The aft cannons on Robotnik's Wing Fortress has landed a glancing blow on their flighter, burning one wing to cinders and dousing them both with a torrent of exotic radiation. Sonic was faster than sound, but not faster than light; he couldn't dodge lasers after they'd been fired. Indeed, his tactic was destroying them, or at least getting out of their way, before they shot at him. So he'd made a blind jump through the air and managed, more by luck than judgement, to land on one of the support girders at the back of the Wing Fortress. Tails, fur smouldering from the blast, had simply fallen away from him, still strapped in to the biplane's pilot seat.

If the worst came to it, Sonic rationalised, Tails could always abandon the plane and fly himself to safety. However, that didn't help the hedgehog in his present predicament.

He had only one option, then.

As metal twisted and rivulets popped out of their holdings, Sonic put on a surge of speed, drawing level with Robotnik's escape vessel as it pulled away from its moorings on the doomed mothership. Bouncing off a tenuous umbilical fuel line, Sonic reached out and grabbed onto a handhold on the side of the craft. The acceleration nearly jerked his arm out of its socket as the Doctor fired booster rockets. Heaving with all his strength, Sonic pulled himself up the side of the hurtling flyer. The heat from the engine fires was blistering, and the air was getting tenuous as Robotnik's streamlined vehicle rose higher into the stratosphere. Sonic glanced back at the dwindling spectacle of Wing Fortress; completely ablaze, it nose-dived out of the sky to be swallowed up by the cloud layer.

Mobius quickly fell away below them, and the vault of atmosphere above attenuated from blue to black. The Doctor was heading for low orbit.

Drawing increasingly frantic breaths as the oxygen petered out, Sonic squinted into the distance as some particularly bright star hove into view. But with the craft's merciless acceleration, the shining object soon ballooned in size; an asteroid, then, or a moon?

That's no moon.

The approaching object was an immense spherical structure, many kilometers across: a steel and glass ball-bearing hanging in the void. Red auorae fluxed across its surface as the last vestiges of the Mobian atmosphere burned themselves against its surface with friction fire. Two massive, sunken pits in the sphere glowed with a baleful crimson light, giving the whole satellite the appearance of a face. A fat, mustachioed face.

The Death Egg. Robotnik's orbital fortress and final stronghold. Much as he loathed the Doctor, twisted parody of his old friend Kintobor, Sonic had to admit, grudgingly, that he could build stuff. Lots of big, complex, ridiculously egotistical stuff. With death rays for eyes. And he could build it fast, too. Not just fast, but-

Sonic shook his head. That was the anoxia talking. Robotnik was a genocidal psychopath, and no amount of industriousness could mitigate that. Besides, Sonic had more pressing things to consider. Like the fact he'd had no oxygen for over a minute, and what little remained in his body was being sucked out of his pores by a trillion cubic light years of hard vacuum. Forcing his eyes to stay open even as the moisture boiled off his corneas, the hedgehog scanned the approaching superstructure for some way of entry. He highly doubted Robotnik was going to be so obliging as to leave the airlock open for him.

There. An observation deck. A metre-thick pane of vacuum-resistant, reinforced glass was, at least, better than a metre-thick bulkhead of vacuum-resistant steel. Summoning the last of his strength, Sonic curled himself up into a ball and launched himself at his chosen target. Only a second later, Robotnik's shuttle fired its retro-boosters; had Sonic still been holding on, the abrupt deceleration would probably have pancaked him.

Travelling, for once, under borrowed momentum rather than his own, the hedgehog felt his thoughts growing increasingly sluggish. He was only able to summon the most rudimentary awareness at the insanity of his plan. If this didn't work… if he didn't have enough speed, if the glass was too thick, if he hit at the wrong angle… he was done for. It'd be Game Over, man.

Sonic spun on through the void.


	2. Chapter 2: Death Egg Zone

"_ALERT, ALERT, hull breach on observation deck 2j Emergency bulkheads lowered. ALERT, ALERT, hull breach on observation deck 2j. Re-pressurising damaged compartment. ALERT, ALERT, hull breach on observation deck 2j…"_

Robotnik glanced up in annoyance at the tannoy speaker as he fumbled with his helmet in the inner airlock.

"_Of course_ there were going to be minor hull breaches; you don't bring a space station this far down into the atmosphere without losing some bulkheads to kinetic ablation!" he retorted. "And that wouldn't have been _necessary_ if the hedgehog hadn't attacked Wing Fortress precisely when the Death Egg was on the other side of the planet!"

Wrenching his flight helmet free, Robotnik threw it violently at the airlock's control panel. He was angry. The destruction of Wing Fortress represented a crippling loss in materiel, firepower, and force deployment capacity, all at the same time. And that was _before _he'd personally had to endure going from 0 to Mobian escape velocity in 5.1 seconds to avoid going down with the ship.

The Death Egg's equatorial rotation had spun back up to 1g as he waited for the airlocks to cycle, and so Robotnik hauled himself out into a comfortably familiar environment of light, metal, and faux-gravity. Indeed, but for the upwards curve of the floor, it was barely distinguishable from that which he'd left behind (permanently, he reminded himself) in Wing Fortress.

"_ALERT, ALERT, unauthorised personnel detected in observation deck 2j"_

Robotnik blinked.

"What?" he asked, incredulous. An intruder? _Here?_ Preposterous!

* * *

_"…precise nature of the gold rings is something else worthy of additional investigation. The most obvious point we can make about them is their profound biomedical properties, as the blue hedgehog has forcibly demonstrated on countless occasions. The rings can apparently undo recent musculo-skeletal damage, and possession of even a single specimen precludes the lethality of all but the most egregious of injuries._

_This on its own is proof that they serve as more than mere biological curative. The vast range of injuries upon which the rings can act, from simple puncture wounds to gigawatt muon laser irradiation, precludes a classical mechanism of action. And then there's the injuries they won't work on: crushing, drowning, explosive deceleration… consult the autopsy reports for Green Hill subject batches 9.210/j through 9.210y inclusive for full details. _

_No, indeed, the truth is far more intriguing. The rings don't cure the injuries; they prevent them from ever occurring, retroactively. One example of particular interest was Green Hill subject 9.189/e-11; a squirrel, _sciurus mobius_. Over the course of the experiment 9.189/e-11 was decapitated using a torque method a total of eight times, with absolutely no ill effects provided the creature was infused with at least one ring. Indeed, multiple rings seem largely redundant as far as surviving injury is concerned. High-speed recording of the incidents showed the subject flicker momentarily, and during these periods they seem impervious to further harm. No matter how many times the specimen's head was removed, it would reappear attached to the neck, without crossing the intervening space, and with no scar tissue, no myoclonic jerking, nothing on the subject's body to indicate that the decapitation event had even taken place. Annoyingly, 9.189/e-11 became profoundly distressed and avoided the ring on the ninth trial, making the decapitation permanent._

_On the other hand; destruction by crushing force was not survivable through possession of a gold ring. This is not so much a distinction born of the type of injury, but rather the _complexity_, and this demonstrates the mechanism by which the rings act. Thermodynamic calculations indicate that the rings are finitely negentropic: they can retroactively negate injuries, but only of a limited disorder._

_Where the negative entropy actually comes from is unclear. The 'flickering', previously described no doubt has some relation, but at the same time it seems to knock the subjects into a phase-state whereby they interact more weakly with standard matter, enabling them to transmit through restraints in many cases. This necessitated rather specialized experimental methods. To this end, in efforts to quantify the nature of the strobing, subjects 9.210/u-04 through 9.210/u-56, all bluebirds, _sialia greenhillus_, were, with an attached ring, subjected to impalement wounds of varying severity. The subjects suffered a causally rate roughly proportional to..."_

A white glove crept over the exposed control panel, by chance grazing a button which turned off the Doctor's grim recording. Groaning painfully, Sonic levered himself out of a layer of plexiglass shards. Gasping breaths drew sweet oxygen into his ragged lungs, and the high-pitched whine in his ears gradually faded, to be replaced by the familiar sound of Robotnik's alarm clarion. It would almost be comforting, if not for the promise of approaching robotic murder.

What had once been observation deck 2j had become, quite literally, a crash site. Although Sonic's speed has smashed through the vacuum-sealed window, emergency decompression bulkheads had slammed down only a second later, preventing the hedgehog, the glass shards, and most of the air from being sucked straight back out into the cold of space. The whole scene was painted crimson by the emergency lighting, and as Sonic propped himself up against the wall, he was thankful for that; he didn't really want to see how much blood he'd lost to the carpet of shards. It felt like a lot.

Glass crunching underfoot, the hedgehog staggered towards the door.

* * *

"Why are you _still_ not dead yet, hedgehog?" Robotnik snarled at his screen. The display showed Sonic, bruised, limping, and weary, but nonetheless advancing through the Doctor's most delicate and important laboratory complexes. The only consolation Robotnik could take was that Sonic refrained from actively smashing the place up; but all the equipment would have to be gamma-irradiated to purge contaminants, and that would kill the painstakingly-cultured biological warfare agents...

Still, not much longer now. Gripping a screwdriver between his teeth, Robotnik plunged his hands into the tangle of wires he'd exposed beneath an auxiliary control sub-router, and began reconnecting electronics with the kind of alacrity afforded only to the very mind who had designed and built the system. The Death Egg was one giant machine; it was the Doctor's home turf, and he intended to demonstrate that to Sonic in the most fatal manner possible.

Rewiring with one hand and reprogramming with the other, Robotnik glanced back at the monitor. Sonic was picking up speed and confidence even as he moved through the low-g workshops. With a start, the Doctor realized that Sonic was only a few rooms away from his own location underneath the auxiliary bridge!

Robotnik spat out his screwdriver in frustration; it cartwheeled lazily in the low gravity before bouncing off the cable-strewn floor with a clang. What kind of dumb luck had brought the blue menace here!? And this quickly? He hadn't finished bypassing his own safety protocols yet – he needed to at least slow the hedgehog down, if only for a few minutes.

As on Wing Fortress, the Doctor ran through Death Egg's inventory in his head. The station was almost completely defenseless internally; "One hundred kilometers of _space_ between it and the Mobian surface should be quite sufficient a defense!" he muttered bitterly. Nonetheless, some of his most advanced weapons prototypes were under development here; perhaps they could be pressed into service… prematurely.

Allowing himself a wicked grin at the clash he was about to instigate, Robotnik tapped out a new series of commands.

* * *

**DEATH EGG WEAPONS LAB  
****Command I.D.: DE m3897/10.c  
****Timestamp: MY10.363 - 90.09.37  
****Emergency Bootup: Project Metallix, Unit 01  
****Authorization: Dr. Ivo Robotnik**

* * *

Sonic wandered unsteadily through the spotless chrome labs, casting his eyes over the unnerving array of humming machines that packed the spotless rooms. Their functions were in most cases utterly obtuse to him; others, he could hazard an unpleasant guess. There are only so many reasons an operating table would need heavy metal restraints and sluices.

The pain in Sonic's lungs had begun to recede – from flaring, near-black-out levels whenever he drew a breath, through simple agony, and now just as though he'd swallowed a few of those shards of glass while he was passed out in observation deck 2j. For all he knew, he _had_, but now really wasn't the time to contemplate exploratory surgery. Sonic was resilient, and as he looked around the lab, his injuries seemed trivial compared to what his fellow Mobians, his _friends_, must have suffered in here, and in Robotnik's other secret labs down on the surface of the planet.

In some ways, Sonic hoped Robotnik enjoyed the experiments he performed; hoped the Doctor had cackled with malicious glee as his subjects were cut or burned or electrocuted at his whims. But he suspected that it hadn't happened like that. Conventional psychotics took pleasure in the deaths they caused because they valued life, and taking it away was an assertion of power. Robotnik… no, Robotnik was different. He didn't enjoy the fact that thousands of thinking creatures had died in his experiments; died in terror and pain and loneliness, far away from their home zones and their families. No, he didn't enjoy it. Because he simply didn't _care._

And if anything, that was _worse_. To Robotnik, the Mobians were truly beneath contempt. Their lives were totally valueless to him; they were simply the means to an end, to verify or disprove one of his precious theories, their entire existance reduced to a single data-point on some graph that only Robotnik would ever read or understand.

A cold fury rose in Sonic as these thoughts swam in his head, the hatred pushing aside such trivial things as his own personal pain and exhaustion. He _would _find the Doctor, and he _would _make him pay.

In general, one found Robotnik simply by smashing his badniks until the Doctor decided it was time to personally enter the fray. But Sonic hadn't seen a single defender since his arrival, leaving the hedgehog somewhat at a loss. An open doorway marked 'Weapons Testing' led out of the labs, and, wanting to leave the macabre operating table behind him, Sonic ambled through the awning.

The first indication Sonic had that something was wrong was a faint whirring sound as he crossed over the threshold. The labs had been illuminated by pale blue light reflected from Mobius' dayside, but there were no windows here, and as Sonic's eyes struggled to accustom to the dim lighting, the door swished shut behind him. Meanwhile, the whirring noise increased; it was a sound like a circular saw-blade revving to life.

When the attack came, it was all Sonic could do to lurch out of the way and avoid being instantly bisected. A grey blur whipped through the space he had been standing in milliseconds before, the turbulence of its passage twisting Sonic around and driving him to the floor, knocking the air out of already-damaged lungs.

Flipping himself over, Sonic stared up at his adversary as it skidded to a halt and turned back to face him. His eyes widened in horror.

Ever since Sonic had first encountered Robotnik's badniks, ever since he has seen how the Doctor trapped captured creatures inside cauls of cold steel, wired up to the robot's internal mechanisms, he had nightmares. He dreamt of a mechanical version of himself, of being dragged into the terminal embrace of those internal wires, of seeing a robotic ribcage snap shut behind him, imprisoning Sonic forever inside a walking crypt.

The metal Sonic was there, as if plucked straight from the darkest recesses of his mind. It towered over him by more than a meter, all angular panes, sharp edges, and steel grays. Cruel, serrated spines punctured out of the robot's back, their blades in constant motion: the source of the ear-piercing whirr. Its eyes were coal-black, with baleful red irises glowing in the half-light.

The rockets in its feet flared, and the robot launched itself at Sonic again.

* * *

A savage smile took form beneath Robotnik's immense moustache as he watched the battle. Sonic and his metallic counterpart threw themselves at each other again and again inside the adjacent room. As the monitor showed the blue hedgehog being slammed into the wall, Robotnik imagined he could feel the force of his impact, despite the many layers of shielding built into the weapons testing compartment.

With one eye on the battle, he nonetheless continued his work modifying the airlock protocols. When he had designed the Death Egg, it had been imperative to ensure that the various airlock doors simply _could not_ be induced to simultaneously open to space. The results would be catastrophic, on this or any other space platform – opening both doors to vacuum would suck everything that wasn't nailed down (and probably a hefty chunk of the things that _were_) out into space. His experiments, his weapons, even the Doctor himself if he'd had the misfortune of being in the wrong compartment when it happened. So it was an elementary tenet of space engineering that should be no way one could open the inner and outer airlock doors at once.

In the present situation, however, that was exactly what needed to happen. Robotnik had been tampering with the hardware and software of the airlock controls for the last eight minutes, and was almost ready to flush Sonic out into space in the most un-ceremonial manner possible. His fingers were a blur as he tapped out commands, tailoring computer codes to evade the firewalls and safeguards he himself had programmed years earlier.

The Doctor glanced at the battle once again. He even allowed himself to hope that Metallix, the metal Sonic, would defeat his flesh-and-blood opponent right now, to save him the trouble of ejecting him into space. Despite the fact that it was only a prototype, a work-in-progress, the metal hedgehog was still a savage killing machine, considerably more resilient than a regular badnik.

At the moment, however, neither hedgehog seemed to be getting the upper hand. Sonic was bloodied but not beaten, and inevitably had the edge in speed over his mechanized opponent. Metallix had the ability to inflict massive damage with his chainsaw spines, but if they never connected, the weapons were irrelevant. Mirroring his counterpart's injuries, one of the metal Sonic's ruby pupils had winked out, the black sclera around it visibly cracked, and electrical discharges arced sporadically from the robot's damaged right shoulder.

The Doctor turned his attention back to the airlock mainframe. An impasse was all he needed. If the machine could hold Sonic at bay for a few more seconds, the reprogramming would be complete, and the eventual result of the battle would be irrelevant. Just a few more safeguards to circumvent…

_THUNK. _

Robotnik defiantly felt that one, even through the shielded wall. One of the combatants had just been thrown against the side of the testing room with immense – and unambiguously fatal – force.

And it wouldn't even matter if it was Metallix. The modifications were complete. Right now, with a single keystroke, he could open the adjacent compartment to space, and send Sonic tumbling to a painful, decompression-induced death.

Robotnik turned to the screen, his face beaming with the certainty of his own triumph.


	3. Chapter 3: Final Boss

**_Sorry to tell you this, but... this chapter has FOOTNOTES.  
"For the love of God, footnotes, in a FANFIC?!" - is what I would say, if I weren't responsible for said travesty. There's only three, but I felt I should warn you before you take the brave (that is to say, foolhardy) decision to read on.  
_**_**In fact, I'm going to put them up here, to prove that they're not pure evil:**_

Foot-n-n-n-notes:  
(1) - Remember, this is set during Sonic 2, before the Doctor knew about... _that.  
_(2) - This little snippet of info is actually relevant for the next chapter, and if you can figure out why... well, you'll have my eternal respect - a commodity of great value, I'm _sure. _(Or not)  
(3) - Shut up, it is a real Zone - level 3 on Sonic 1 for the Game Gear, if my memory of being six serves me correctly.**_

* * *

_**

**PROJECT METALLIX, UNIT 01, COMMAND DIRECTORY  
****Command I.D.: MX01 d937/08.l  
****Timestamp: MY10.363 - 90.29.41  
****Damage assessment: Project Metallix, Unit 01  
****Authorization: MX01**

_**Searching…**_

**-ERROR /-5490v21g1z-MX01:codeS?**

_**File Access:**_

"…_all aspects of a single higher-dimensional entity. This only holds if postulates 19/c AND 21/a are true, of course; but if they are, then we can make some headway in that direction. First, recalling our basic n-dimensional geometry: __In the same way that a line is one dimension up from a point, a square is one up from a line, and a cube is one up from a square; the hypothetical shape known as a tesseract is one up from a cube._ _We thought of such structures as being inherantly impossible to measure physically, for a__n object with eight three-dimensional cubes as _faces_ not only boggles the mind - it simply cant _fit_ in a universe with three spatial dimensions._

_But that was before the emeralds demanded an explanation. So too could the emeralds be considered facets of a polydimensional shape; possibly a tesseract, but the zonohedrality, geometry, or even dimensionality, of this hyper-shape is not something one can begin to tackle without more empirical data. Interestingly, my Reimann calcualtions suggest that if the total dimensionality is a prime number, there should,_ somewhere _on this planet, be a kind of… well, a significantly different emerald, corresponding to the intrinsic inequality in rendering an indivisible dimensionality onto a lower plane. Precisely how this difference would manifest in our 3D frame of reference is impossible to predict without knowing the precise integer value of the conjectured hyperobject; this prime emerald could be larger or smaller, or a radically different shape, or any number of things. But more relevantly, it should be more _powerful.

_If we follow postulate 14/d, remembering proof 8, and use some elementary Goldbach number theory, it follows that even the quantum vacuum distortion from such an emerald should be particularly suitable for producing extensive antigravity fields; of course, the absence of large chunks of rock floating around in the sky is powerful circumstantial evidence that no such object in fact exists._(1)

_Irrespective of the above considerations, a higher-dimensional nature of the emeralds would enable them to, at the very least, permit near-uninhibited, weakly acausal translation through spatial _and _temporal vectors – and by proof 3/f, with which I am _loathsomely _well-acquainted, this enables transport between alternative timelines. As for simple forwards/backwards temporal manipulation: in principle, this can be achieved with any of the emeralds, although, as proof 3/i demonstrates, combining the grey and turquoise stones together_(2) _is probably the path-of-least-resistance in this regard. The Exclusion Principle at first implies…"_

_**Access cancelled  
**__**- File routing damaged? - Abort/RETRY/Fail  
**__.  
__.  
__**Redacting  
**__**.  
**__**.  
**__**.  
**_**PROJECT METALLIX, UNIT 01, COMMAND DIRECTORY  
****Command I.D.: MX01 d9387/08.2  
****Timestamp: MY10.363 - 90.29.42  
****Damage assessment: Project Metallix, Unit 01  
****Authorization: MX01**

_**Lower Servoactuators: RL/a – 14 functionality; RL/b – 23 functionality; RL/c – 0 functionality; LL/a – 0 functionality; LL/b – 03 functionality; LL/c – 0 functionality.**_

_**Processing: Target acquisition – 43 functionality; Combat prescience computation – 82 functionality; Reactor containment – 10 functionality; 4D rendering –  
**__**-  
**__**-  
**__**-  
**__**EMERGENCY REPROCESSING**_

**PROJECT METALLIX, UNIT 01, COMMAND DIRECTORY  
****Command I.D.: MX01 d9387/09.l  
****Timestamp: MY10.363 - 90.29.42  
****Damage assessment: Project Metallix, Unit 01  
****Authorization: MX01 Emergency Countermeasures**

_**Emergency redirect of processor capacity to reactor containment  
**__**.  
**__**.  
**__**.  
**_**-ERROR /-5490v21g1z-MX01:codeCF**

* * *

Blood dripped freely from the gash in Sonic's shoulder. The bite of the chainsaw had been almost painless in the moment of incision… but not any more. His nerves screamed at him from all quarters: crumpled quills from the impact against the wall; a third-degree burn across his left leg from Metallix's rocket shoes; and the fight had reopened a hefty proportion of his lacerations from the observation room.

But he was the one still standing.

The robot was crumpled powerlessly against the wall of the weapons lab. Its spines revved intermittently, grinding sparks out of the steel bulkhead, and one leg jerked as the machine's capacitors leaked charge into ruined systems. Smoke rose uselessly from Metallix's rocket shoes, and clear oil bled out of a cracked fuel line, pooling around broken bolts and fragments of plate armour. One eye was smashed, a jumble of fused wires spilling forth from the gap like a parody of grey matter; the other still flickered a dull red. In fact, Sonic thought, if anything the flickering seemed to be getting brighter, and faster-

Sonic dived for cover before remembering that there was none. It was a smart move nevertheless; if the hedgehog had still been touching the floor, the electrical discharge would have melted his sneakers to red goo. Faster than even Sonic's senses could follow, plasma lightning flashed across every surface of the room. A tiny blue tendril of the crackling energy jumped through the air to touch Sonic's outstretched fingers; the power spun him around in midair like a dynamo.

Then, three-fifths of a microsecond later, the reactor containment _really _failed.

Sonic had seen a lot of badniks explode in his time, and, had he been in any mood to give out scores, he would have rated it 'anticlimactic'. The robot was gone in an instant, replaced by a ball of white light; and then, with a quiet '_pop_', that too vanished.

Sonic landed, and rolled to a halt, shedding the spin he'd picked up from the lightning strike. After picking himself up, he paused to check that all his spines were still there. With equal parts surprise and relief, Sonic found no new injuries beyond a char mark on his glove. If anything, he felt slightly better than before, now that nightmarish machine version of himself was gone. He could breathe easier, at least, as the fear of being captured inside the robot eased out of him.

Metallix hadn't even left behind a satisfying mound of wreckage. Or much of the wall, for that matter. Where the metal hedgehog had lain, there was now a circular bite taken out of the weapons testing compartment bulkhead. Beyond, Sonic could see a floor strewn with untidy tangles of cable.

Clutching his slowly-clotting shoulder with one hand, the hedgehog made his way through.

* * *

Robotnik had seen a lot of badniks explode in his time, and, had he been in any mood to give out scores, he would have rated it 'spectacular'. The electrical discharge as magnetic containment failed was a symphony of Fermi Reassertion, rendered in crackling cyan; and that wasn't even the main event! The scorching white energies of a burgeoning fusion fireball, growing and then being snuffed out behind a de Sitter horizon, leaving only residual Hawking radiation to disturb the atmosphere… beautiful, _beautiful_! The Doctor wobbled with glee at his own cleverness, to design something that, even in total failure, could come to an end with such aplomb.

And then he remembered where he was.

His finger still hovered over the 'Enact' key, his screen flashing "WARNING: PROCEEDING MAY CAUSE DECOMPRESSION IN WEAPONS TESTING LAB". A lot of good it would do him now, with a metre-wide hole carved through the shielded bulkhead.  
"And where does that hole lead? Oh, that's right. To the sub-router under the auxiliary bridge," Robotnik told himself, withdrawing his hand from the keyboard, only to bury his face in the palm. "Where I am right now."

Reluctantly, the Doctor glanced over his shoulder. The de Sitter horizon from Metallix's shutdown, that he'd been so proud of mere seconds ago, had carved a perfectly spherical chunk out of the universe, which, unfortunately for Robotnik, included the section of wall between him and Sonic. Indeed, as the Doctor watched, the blue hedgehog rolled into view, then picked himself up off the floor and appeared to be checking his own spines. Robotnik spitefully wondered whether or not the accursed mutant could actually count that high, before reminding himself that now would be a _very_ good time to leave.

* * *

Sonic stepped cautiously through the tangle of wires and discarded keyboards. Under normal circumstances, he'd have torn the place up just to aggravate Eggman, but zero rings and an excess of cuts and bruises tended to make him _slightly_ less eager to charge in spines-first. The hedgehog compromised by picking up a screwdriver and throwing it at a monitor screen; it smashed with a satisfying burst of sparks.

Sonic walked out into the largest room he had ever seen.

Some of the 'reprocessing workshops' in Scrap Brain Zone had been big; steel caves ringing with the frentic industrial noise of badnik construction. But this was different.  
It was a vast, silent place. The Death Egg was appropriately named, Sonic realized, for it was an eggshell skin of metal enclosing a completely hollow interior. The floor curved upwards from the hedgehog in all directions, coming back together again miles above him. Sonic wasn't afraid of heights; he'd been balancing on the wings of a bi-plane built and piloted by an eight-year-old only hours before. But the sight of this crazy, inside-out worldlet made even Sonic's eyes water, as an ancestral impulse in his head yelled to curl up into a ball until the bad things had gone away.

Lowering his gaze from the dizzying spectacle, Sonic scanned around the curving expanse. Vast strips of glass embedded in the floor looked out onto a twinkling starscape, with the nightside surface of Mobius laid out below. Sonic saw a bank of cloud rolling over the Jungle Zone(3), the multicoloured lights of what must be Casino Night, and he thought he could even make out the dying embers of the fire he'd started in Oil Ocean. Sonic had looked at the grainy photographs in Kintobor's lab years ago, from the first satellites the Doc had been able to send up… but never anything like this.

"**Enjoying the view?" **boomed a voice from above him.  
Sonic was moving before Eggman's sentence finished, darting away across the curving metal. The impact knocked him off his feet even then, and as he skidded to a halt on the smooth glass of a window segment, Sonic caught sight of the Doctor's last line of defense.

It was a giant Robotnik. Not that the scientist wasn't a bloated whale already, Sonic thought, but this was even worse. It was as if Eggman had taken the idea of a metal Sonic, decided there had to be a metal Robotnik to balance things out, and then gone _insane_ with egomania (which, as it happened, was actually quite an accurate description of the robots' design process).

The mecha towered over twenty metres tall, bristling with antennae and sensor dishes. It's torso was spherical, with red and yellow paintwork mimicking the Doctor's own jumpsuit. Immense robotic limbs branched from the central mass, secondary motors roaring as the arms swung and one titanic foot rammed down in front of the other. The head was a pink dome, bulging out from the top of the central sphere. A vast metallic moustache twitched back and forth beneath its pointed nose; Sonic felt an unpleasant tingling as it bounced rangefinder waves off his skeleton, pinpointing the position of every bone in his body down to millimeter precision. Triangular windows of reinforced glass afforded a view into the cockpit; the hedgehog could just make out Robotnik himself, franticly cranking levers in response to the data he was receiving. The mecha took another jarring step.

Sonic regarded its slow progress with a smile. "Your robot's even slower than _you_ are, Eggman, and that's saying something!" he yelled. The only sign of response was another bone-tingling blast of rangefinder waves; Robotnik's walking shrine to himself continued its slow, stomping pace forwards.

The hedgehog folded his arms across his chest, ignoring the dull pain in his shoulder as he eyed the approaching behemoth for weak spots. The obvious target was the head, but it would be a difficult jump to make – and it'd need a significant run-up.

With that in mind, Sonic dashed off, climbing the curve of the Death Egg's interior shell. Glass and metal blurred together beneath his feet as he opened up distance between himself and the robot Eggman.

* * *

Robotnik shook his head condescendingly at the screen displaying Sonic's progress, watching the hedgehog race away from him. "Someone should have paid more attention in Orbital Mechanics Class, eh, hedgehog?" he muttered wryly, as his tetrahertz radar monitored Sonic's ascent.

The Doctor knew how to produce gravity plating, by manipulating the Lens-Thirring effect; indeed, he had been exploiting it for years to float his Egg-O-Matic. But the manufacturing process was complicated, and consumed _thousands_ of rings, so simply hadn't been worth it in an installation as large as the Death Egg. Instead, the station 'faked' gravity at its equator by spinning on its axis. The further you got from the equator, the weaker the faux-gravity became – and this was precisely what that idiot hedgehog was in the process of finding out.

Tapping the optical zoom, Robotnik watched with a sneer as Sonic stumbled in the attenuating centrifugal gravity. This was his chance.

An explosive boom echoed around the Death Egg's internal void as the Doctor turned on his mecha's vast jetpack. Pentaborane and liquid oxygen waves smashed against each other in the rocket chamber, and the metallic giant rose off the floor on a plume of fire.

Once airbourne, the cockpit processors took over, bathing Sonic in a constant wash of tetrahertz radar, constantly course-correcting to optimize the chances of crushing the hedgehog beneath a steel boot. Although the lack of gravity denied Sonic's sneakers much of their purchase, the hedgehog was still speeding over the polar axis at close to three hundred kilometres an hour; not an easy target by any means.

Robotnik's stomach lurched as his machine flipped over, bringing the full force of a thousand tones of rocket-powered Eggman crashing down on the spot Sonic was predicted to be. He bounced in his restraints as the feet made contact with the Death Egg's superstructure, and immediately began pulling keyboards back towards him, scanning for signs that the hedgehog might have escaped his fate. A chorus of 'Warning!' messages vied for his attention, dispassionately informing the Doctor that he was pushing the machine beyond safe limits; he purged them dismissively with a few terse commands, and ordered the tetrahertz scanners to make another sweep.

_THERE. _The hedgehog was zig-zagging his way back down to the equatorial band; apparently he had learned his lesson.

"**Get back here, you obnoxious pincushion!" **he roared, and microphones in the cockpit transmitted his voice as a deafening baritone across the inner sphere. Sonic's voice had no chance of reaching him, but the tetrahertz scans could resolve the hedgehog's vocal chords in motion, synthesizing the words back to Robotnik as though his nemesis was in the cockpit with him.

"How can you expect me to stay still, when you've left me all this room to run around in?" came Sonic's retort. "Seriously, Eggman, what were you planning to _do_ with all this space? Or did you just get too lazy to finish building in here?"

"**I won't demean my installation by explaining it in such lowly terms as **_**you**_** could understand, vermin!"** Robotnik shot back. **"Suffice it to say that, once I activate this station, I will never have to deal with you, or any of your pestilent Mobian friends, **_**ever again!**_**"**

Robotnik jabbed his splayed fingers down on the control panel, and felt the recoil as his robot's forearms blasted forwards on their own rockets. Sonic hadn't been expecting that; he ducked under the first, stumbled, and narrowly avoided being impaled by the second as they roared past him. Simultaneously hammering commands into two seperate keyboards, the Doctor instructed his missiles to make a second pass as they returned, but, again, to no avail; the hedgehog could see them coming this time, and swerved away from the equatorial band towards the south polar axis.

Apparently he had _not _learned his lesson about gravity.

Robotnik's mech raised its truncated arms, and the rockets snapped back into their elbow joints with a force that almost knocked the obese scientist out of his chair. Yet more alerts blinked into existance on the upper bank of monitors, the machine stridently reminding its designer that _"WARNING: This prototype has incomplete inertia-damping mechanisms. WARNING: This prototype's combat capabilities are being exceeded. WARNING…"_

"Silence!" Robotnik roared, his face a crimson rictus of fury. "I have him, I HAVE HIM!" Cranking the rocket thrust dangerously high into the yellow, the Doctor launched his leviathan into the air again, intent on catching the hedgehog as Sonic repeated his error in braving the zero-g of the poles. Robotnik didn't even need the rangefinders this time; he could see the blue speck with his own eyes through the windows, watching it grow in size as his giant mechanical simulacrum bore unstoppably down upon it…

The robot crashed down too hard, and too fast. Robotnik's head jerked forwards, and he bit into his own tongue. A trickle of blood oozed out from between the Doctor's clenched teeth as his mech buckled at the knees, just managing to soak up the force of the landing. It was the Death Egg itself that came off worst from the impact; two immense footprints were stamped into the steel floor, a tracery of microfractures radiating out from the site. The station was built to withstand a meteorite impact at a tenth of the speed of light, but it wasn't supposed to be battered from the _inside_. Robotnik winced, not at his own injury, but at the damage to his magnificent creation. That entire plate would have to be replaced, to say nothing of the unseen damages to the circuitry buried beneath the floor. He might even have to bring up replacement superconducting polymer from the Chemical Plant Zone, which would take-

Sonic's devastating counterattack was over almost before the Doctor knew it had begun. Sparks exploded from the control panel in front of him, and a coolant pipe snapped out of its moorings below, thrashing back and forth as it the liquid helium inside flash-evaporated.  
In less than a second, Robotnik realized how completly he'd been tricked. The hedgehog had known _exactly _what he was doing, running over the polar regions again. As the robot bowed at the knees to cushion the brunt force of landing, that anarchist mutant had leapt through the low gravity, smashing right into its metallic face. Through a network of cracks which blossomed across the cockpit windows, Robotnik saw the spiked blur unfurl as he rebounded; Sonic winked right at him before dropping out of sight. Then the hedgehog was just a blue streak, racing away up the curve of the world.

"No, no, no, _no, NO!_" the Doctor yelled, the refrain flecking his moustache with sanguine blood. Electricity continued to dance across the ruined control panel, and the chorus of wailing klaxons abruptly cut out - an absence far more alarming than their actual alarms had ever been. One by one, his displays flashed from red, to static, to black. The last monitor read:

_**Prototype: E-97 Series, model R4  
**__**WARNING: This prototype's combat capabilities have been exceeded!  
**__**WARNING: Reactor failure imminent!  
**__**WARNING: Reactor failure in 14!  
**__**WARNING: Reactor failure in 13!  
**__**WARNING: This prototype has no de Sitter containment safeguards installed!  
**__**WARNING: Reactor failure in 12!  
**__**WARNING: This prototype is fitted with a Mark-12 Solarium-lambda reactor! Uncontrolled shutdown may  
initiate weakly acausal subspace distortions!  
**__**WARNING: Reactor failure in 11!**_

The screen was wrong.  
Because it only took another eight seconds.


	4. Epilogue: Wait, what?

**_A note from the author_**

**_This is the EPILOGUE, folks. There's no more of the increasingly-inaccurately-titled  
Wing Fortress Zone after this. So if you were ever planning to pen a review... now is the time._**

**_And I had this planned from the middle of writing Chapter 2. I SWEAR._**

* * *

It was raining in the Jungle Zone. A blanket of cloud stretched from horizon to horizon, muting the pre-dawn light to a grey haze. Giant Mobian pythons crawled lazily through the undergrowth, their sinuous bellies stuffed after the night's hunt, while, in the canopy, the zone's thousand species of brightly-coloured birds were beginning to rouse themselves from sleep. Viewing the pervasive drizzle, however, all but the most hardy were dissuaded from venturing out of their nests just yet. Uncountable varieties of creepy-crawlies scuttled amidst the foliage, antennae ceaselessly probing for a morsel of decomposing flesh or a grain of pollen to eat.

A wide waterfall roared down a granite ridge, the relic of some million-year-old tectonic shift. Like the rest of the Jungle Zone, the vertiginous wall was festooned with brilliant greenery, vines and creepers finding tenuous purchase in the crags and clefts of the rockface. It was fortuitous that the rainforest fauna exhibited such tenacity for the lone figure that inched his way towards the summit. He muttered a curse as a rain-slick vine slipped through his fingers, and made a vain attempt to dry the hand on equally damp, matted fur.

Three further attempts and a lot of swearing later, a red-gloved hand finally rose above the top of the precipice. Then another, grabbing onto a knotted tree root that crept along the periphery. The muscles bunched, and, laboriously, a brown Stetson hat lifted above the cliff edge, framed by two long, purple ears. The hat paused momentarily as its owner re-gathered his strength, and then, with a final heave, pulled himself up onto the moss-covered cliff-top.

"I… _hate…_jungles." Nack panted as he staggered upright. The weasel's purple fur hang soggy with rain and sweat, his long tail drooping under the weight of accumulated moisture, while the white coat of his belly was streaked in earthy greens and browns from the climb. His waist was girdled by a thick utility belt, numerous khaki pouches around its circumference concealing all manner of vocational paraphernalia: rope, lockpicks, caltrops, _more _lockpicks; and, of course, his twin handguns, securely holstered on either side of his hips. A lot of good all that stuff was doing him now; he really wished he'd not forgotten to bring a towel. Or at least a spare hat. Wearily, he fished a trapped twig out of his empty food pouch, and flicked it over the edge of the precipice. It sailed downwards, swiftly lost in the haze of warm rain.

After wringing out his hat as best he could, Nack raised a hand to his forehead and scanned the jungle below him. A sea of verdant green stretched away into the mist, broken only by the sinuous meander of a river snaking through the trees, just visible as a grey ribbon in the distance. His sharp eyes would have to serve, here; the treasure-hunter had lost his binoculars when a rotten rope-bridge dumped him into that damn river twelve hours ago. His glove still bore a tear from where he'd punched a crocodile.

This was a horrible Zone. There were no crumbling temples, no broken ruins of ancient civilizations peeking through the treetops, with their promises of forgotten gold and treasure troves waiting to slake his avarice. Just green, green, green.

The weasel sighed. What could he do? At least he was getting paid for being here. Well, he _would _get paid, if he managed to find what he was looking for in this rain-drenched joke of a forest.

* * *

The machinery had started falling out of the sky five weeks ago. This in itself wasn't particularly interesting, from Nack's point of view; the only metal he cared about was the golden kind. Or possibly silver, if it was a lean month. But it was evident that other folks didn't share his indifference. The retrieval jobs had been coming thick and fast, and not just from Larry the Finch or the Gigapopolis cartels. There had been new, unfamiliar figures lurking in the dank cantinas of the Metropolis Zone; characters with that chirped or growled or tweeted in hushed voices, and passed unmarked envelopes beneath stained countertops. _They_, at least, were interested in the celestial junk, and were willing to pay handsomely to anyone who could bring them a piece. Nack was enough of a professional not to question _why_ his employers wanted whatever trinkets they commissioned him to 'collect' – not within their earshot, anyway.

All of which considerations would be entirely academic unless he could find the damn space-wreckage-thing. The condors he'd talked to, back in the foothills of the Sky High Zone, _claimed_ they saw a shooting star heading for this place, but the weasel was beginning to cultivate serious doubts about those birds' sense of direction.

Although… Nack's eyes might have failed to help him, but he had other senses too. And just for a moment, he thought he caught a whiff of…? Not the tangy scent of scorched metal that usually accompanied these finds, but _something_ nearby had defiantly been on fire, and that was good enough for him. Turning his back on the cliff edge, the weasel pushed impatiently into the trees.

* * *

The stench of cremated foliage filled Nack's nose as he advanced through the uncooperative shrubbery. Tiny flames danced in the underbrush, which was quite unnerving – the weasel had been in this Zone for two days, and it hadn't stopped raining the entire time. How were these fires still burning, exactly?

Something felt decidedly wrong, here. The weasel unholstered one of his guns, spinning the cylinder before snapping off the safety with a reassuring '_click_!'  
Then a beetle fell out of the barrel. Nack screwed up his face in exasperation. He hated this Zone.

Making his movements as quiet as he could manage, the treasure-hunter crept forwards, towards the scent. There were flames flickering in the trees as well, now; apparently oblivious to the all-pervasive rainfall. Fire wasn't supposed to behave like that. Nack knew; he'd burned down his fair share of (his own) safehouses when the need arose to appear missing-presumed-dead.

Easing aside a particularly large frond with his gun barrel, the weasel emerged into a blackened ruin of jungle. The trees, hundred-year-old Mobian banyans and jungle nyssaceaes, lay scattered like used matchsticks, radiating outwards from the centre of the charred clearing. Whatever had done this, it was orders of magnitude more powerful than the pitiful meteors Nack had dug up so far. Sure, they'd left craters, but nothing like this. Which meant that… if this one was bigger, his employers would _pay_ bigger.  
Greed vied with caution in the weasel's head – and won quite easily. Jumping up on top of an ashen bough, Nack threaded his way between the eerie flames towards the epicenter of destruction.

It… it wasn't a meteor.

The scraps Nack had recovered on previous expeditions had been wreckage; fist-sized chunks of metal and circuitry that had somehow managed to survive the ravages of their fall from heaven. On an earlier job, he'd even found one piece with a little green light that kept blinking on and off – there'd been a bidding war over that one when he brought it back to Metropolis. The weasel really didn't know what his employers thought they'd be able to _do_ with the pieces of artifice; he suspected _they_ didn't know either, but were too scared that they were missing a trick over their competitors. So they bought the useless trinkets anyway, in an economic cycle of confusion and mistrust where only the meteor-hunters came out richer. Not that Nack would take _advantage_ of a situation like that. Perish the thought.

But this wasn't a lump of metal.

It was a cat.

She lay, curled up, inside concentric rings of fire, the flames of the inner circle almost licking against her lavender fur. A tripod of lilac ponytails erupted from the crown of her head, the effect spoiled somewhat by the fact that they trailed into an ash-blackened puddle. The cat wore… what looked like it had once been a very expensive, dark purple waistcoat, and slim, white pants, belying just a hint of feminine curves nestled inside. However regal the ensemble had once appeared, though, it was ruined now; frayed, tattered, and soaked through with muddy water. A long violet tail curved away behind the disheveled feline, terminating in a tuft of fuzz just before the fiery boundary.

She looked dead.

Nack approached cautiously, his gun aimed right at the unmoving form. Stamping out the intervening flames as best he could, the weasel leaned over this huddled creature. She_ wasn't _dead, he saw now; her chest rose and fell weakly, the fires of the broken circles seeming to wax and wane in synch with her respiration.

Surely _she_ hadn't fallen out of the sky. Of course, if not, this raised the question of how the hell she'd gotten out here, and why she was lying in the middle of a charred ring of trees. The weasel hadn't anticipated _this_.  
But Nack was nothing if not adaptable. Keeping his eyes, and his weapon, trained on the comatose figure, the weasel reached down into the ashen dirt with his free hand. His glove closed around a piece of blackened debris, and, raising it tentatively, poked the cat with a stick.

She groaned, and again, as he jabbed her a bit harder. The cat's eyes inched open fractionally, yellow irises hiding behind long, black lashes.

Nack poked her again.

"No…" she muttered, almost too low for him to hear. "…n't llow… can't s ere m ing…"

The weasel growled with annoyance. Deciding that this mud-splattered feline was in no position to threaten him, Nack slipped his revolver back into its holster. Kneeling down next to her, he grabbed the cat's shoulders and pulled her up out of the sodden dirt. Her voice was getting a little stronger, but no more intelligible. "…ver er are wh yo _silver_…"

The treasure-hunter's ears pricked up at that. Propping the lilac creature up against the charred stump of a giant banyan, he clicked his fingers rapidly in front of her shuttered eyelids. "Hey, hey, hey!" he shouted at her face, "Wake up, cat, wake up. Come on. Sleepy time's over."  
The cat's eyes flickered open once again. She stared at his clicking fingers for a moment, disorientated, before her eyes started to roll back in her head.  
Nack hissed through his teeth, baring his fangs in exasperation. He cupped the cat's chin in his left hand, gloved fingers smearing soot onto the soft white pelt her lower jaw. Bringing his other arm up, he backhanded her across the face, hard.  
"No, no, don't go back under. Look at me. _Look at me_. What's this about silver? _Look at me! _Where is it?"

The cat eyes focused on Nack's face, finally. He held her gaze, threateningly, although she seemed more surprised than intimidated.  
"Are you real?" she asked.

The question threw him for a fraction of a second, and before he knew what was happening, she had wrapped her arms around him. The cat was crying, Nack realized in a startled corner of his mind, as she buried her violet face in his chest. Sobs wracked the feline's frame as her hands clutched desperatly at the fur of his back, frantic to verify the weasel's existence. "I thought they'd catch me," she stammered, in a shaking voice. "I never thought I'd get out of-"

Nack slammed her back into the blasted wreckage of the tree, his right hand curled around her throat. As if by magic, a gun appeared in his left; he pressed it against the cat's forehead, grey eyes flashing with wrath. Burnt leaves, shaken loose by the impact, rained down on the purple duo as the weasel constricted his grip on her windpipe.

"_Don't_… _do_… _that_" he hissed, his finger shaking on the revolver's trigger. Nack couldn't _believe_ he'd allowed her under his guard. Why hadn't he reacted faster? The fact that she hadn't attacked him was neither here nor there. She _could_ have.  
Those pretty yellow eyes were wide with shock as continued to push the cat into the ruined wood. She emitted a strangled purr beneath Nack's glove, but he had no intention of relinquishing his grip, not after last time.

Unnervingly, a tendril of steam weaved up from the lilac fur underneath Nack's gun, and felt his hand at the cat's throat growing uncomfortably warm. She seemed to be concentrating, hard.  
"Ah-ah-ah," he admonished, tapping the barrel of his revolver against the cat's skull. "Don't get clever, kitty. I don't know what you're doing, but whatever it is, I suggest you _stop it_. Right now." Nack pressed his face against hers, staring straight into the cat's depthless eyes. She held his gaze, unblinking. Measuring.  
The moment seemed to stretch on, as if the sands of time had ground to a halt in some phantom hourglass. But then, gradually, and to his immense relief, the heat under Nack's glove began to abate. The sounds and smells of the jungle rushed back into his perceptions; for once, the weasel was glad to hear them.  
He wasn't quite sure what he'd have done if she'd called his bluff.

In reciprocation, Nack loosened his hold on her throat, allowing the cat to breathe more freely. "You don't seem to understand my position here, princess," he intoned. Her eyes narrowed fractionally, as if he'd said something unexpected. The weasel ignored it. "I've been crawling around in this godforsaken jungle for two days, and besides half a crocodile tooth, you're the only thing I've got to show for it. So-"

"No, _you _don't understand" the cat hissed. Her earlier fragility seemed to have vanished; getting smashed into a tree had apparently jolted her out of whatever delirium she'd woken up with. "What year is it? Have they arrived yet?"

"What the hell are you talking about?" Nack demanded. Maybe he was wrong, and she _was_ still crazy.

The cat fixed him with her otherworldly yellow eyes. The intensity of the gaze cowed him, a little; he squeezed the handle of his revolver fractionally, reassuring himself that he could still put a bullet in her at a moment's notice. But despite the hand round her throat and the gun at her temple, he couldn't shake the feeling that she was the one in control of _this_ moment.

"They saw me," Blaze whispered. "In the gap between worlds. The Zoah. _They saw where I went."_

* * *

**_"Lol, BlazexNack"_**


End file.
